Shutdown

As a follow-up to this post about 15 ways to shut down a Windows laptop, it’s worth noting this account of the labyrinthine process of designing the Windows Start menu from a former Microsoft engineer which goes some way towards explaining why the Windows Vista Start menu is such a dog’s breakfast:

I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006.

The most frustrating year of those seven was the year I spent working on Windows Vista, which was called Longhorn at the time. I spent a full year working on a feature which should’ve been designed, implemented and tested in a week. To my happy surprise (where “happy” is the freude in schadenfreude), Joel Spolsky wrote an article about my feature.

[…]

[Here’s…] how the design process worked: approximately every 4 weeks, at our weekly meeting, our PM would say, “the shell team disagrees with how this looks/feels/works” and/or “the kernel team has decided to include/not include some functionality which lets us/prevents us from doing this particular thing”. And then in our weekly meeting we’d spent approximately 90 minutes discussing how our feature — er, menu — should look based on this “new” information. Then at our next weekly meeting we’d spend another 90 minutes arguing about the design, then at the next weekly meeting we’d do the same, and at the next weekly meeting we’d agree on something… just in time to get some other missing piece of information from the shell or kernel team, and start the whole process again.

Or, to put it another way, Microsoft in 2006 has become the IBM of 1990.

[Via Joel on Software]